Tax Consumers!

In yet another proof of the late Alexander Cockburn’s thesis that one of the main roles of the major commercial media outlets is to turn plain and simple facts into harebrained nonsense, on Sunday, The New York Times ran this piece of fumbling jabberwocky from Thomas B Edsall. In it, while conveying some useful information about the un-represented views and preferences of the U.S. public (and avoiding the topic of how the Democratic Party simultaneously both exploits and carefully ignores those views and preferences), Edsall not only promulgates the notion of “tax consumers,” but does so in a way so uncritical and uninformed, it would embarrass a seventh grader.

Edsall accepts the core premise of this uber-preposterous piece of statistical propaganda from the Heritage Foundation. That thesis is, of course, the hugely braindead and radically dishonest claim that it is only those who receive direct government aid from long-standing programs who are “tax consumers,” i.e. people whose lives are boosted by public handouts.

If you know anything at all about economics or actual government spending in the United States, you will be joining me in this, the only possible reaction: ROFLMFAO!

Not only does this framing of the issue bypass topics such as who benefits from things like Quantitivate Easing and “one-time” government bail-out waves, but take a look at the elementary facts.

Federal spending on transportation, the military, military pensions, and interest on the debt (money borrowed from capitalists) is roughly equal to spending on medical insurance and what remains of welfare. (Including Social Security is, of course, bogus, since it is its own, self-funded system.) Where, pray tell, would our 1 percenters be without those outlays for fancy corporate weaponry, roadways for the core corporate capitalist product (the private automobile), wars in oil regions, and free money from treasury notes?

And, at the level of economics, where would the private sector of the U.S. economy be without all of those government outlays, including the medical and welfare payments? It would be up Shit Creek, that’s where. John Maynard Keynes explained that 76 years ago. You might think an Ivy League/NYT intellectual superstar would be able to at least make mention of what Keynes elucidated: the profound (and always growing) dependency of our “job creators” (who are actually, left to their own devices, job destroyers) on “consuming” taxes.

Postscript: In a further proof of his (real or feigned) ignorance of the Keynesian nature of reality, Edsall also suggests that “raising capital gains taxes or cutting food stamps” is an example of a zero-sum choice! The truth, of course, is that raising capital gains taxes would, by employing presently unproductive capital, allow a painless hike in food stamp spending. It is, in other words, the exact definition of an extremely non-zero-sum choice. The reason it appears as the opposite is not because of the economy, but because of the calculated unwillingness of the cash-grubbing Democratic Party to explain basic reality to its victims constituents.

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Consumer Trap: The Book

“meticulous and illuminating…lays bare some of the most important developments of the twentieth century….sketches directions for a humane alternative to domination by ‘corporate overlords’ and the state power to which they are closely linked”